In 1843, Watts won a prize in
the competition to design murals in the new Houses of Parliament. He
used the money to visit Italy, where he studied the works of the old
masters. This pursuit conditioned Watts to think in terms of allegory
and exalted idealism. He returned to England in 1847 and was soon
recognised as a major painter in aesthetic circles, before achieving
popular fame in 1880. Thereafter, he became a revered figure in the
English art establishment. His style was influenced by Etty, the Elgin
marbles, Titian and Michelangelo.

According
to the notes by Mrs Watts (Watts Gallery archives), Salome's action of
holding up the ring of Herod indicates that responsibility for the death
of St John the Baptist is not hers but the King's.

Watts'
thoughts were almost invariably "pressed in such allegorical terms
as Love and Death. Oscar Wilde
reviewed the first version of this work (Whitworth Art Gallery,
Manchester) in the exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. In his
notice, he described the work as:

Ďa large painting,
representing a marble doorway, all overgrown with white-starred
jasmine and sweet briar rose. Death a giant form, veiled in grey
draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious power,
breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the
threshold, and one relentless hand is "tended, while Love, a
beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow coloured wings, all
shrinking like a crumpled leaf, is trying, with vain hands, to bar
the entrance. A little dove, undisturbed by the agony of the
terrible conflict, waits patiently at the foot of the steps for her
playmate, but will wait in vain, for though the face of death is
hidden from us, yet we can see from the terror in the boy's eyes and
quivering lips, that Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it
looks upon to stone; and the wings of love are rent and crushed'

He
compares Watts' work with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Continuing in
the same vein two years later, Wilde considered Watts the 'most powerful
of all our living English artists'.

The
inspiration for this painting dates from Watts' travels around the Greek
islands in 1856. For Wilde, as for Watts, early visits to Greece and a
love of Greek poetry were to be of great inspirational importance. When
rusticated for truancy for being late back from a trip to Greece, Wilde
claimed later that he was sent down 'for being the first undergraduate
to visit Olympia'. In the 'Critic as Artist' (1890), Wilde wrote of his
strong conviction that Aristotle, unlike Plato, offered a theory of art
'from the purely aesthetic point of view' and a sense of beauty realised
through the passions of pity and awe'. Wilde was to give his own highly
personal spin to the whole concept of Hellenism, writing, in a
characteristic aphorism: 'To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be
mediaeval one should have no body: to be modern one should have no soul.'

During
the evolution of the composition of the painting, Watts made wax models
after the pose of Phidias's Theseus from the Parthenon pediment, which
was the artist's major source of inspiration for the central reclining
figure in the composition.

Lillie
Langtry sat for Watts on many occasions, and left amusing accounts of
her visits to his studio. On one visit, he decided to depict her in 'a
quaint little poke bonnet from which he ruthlessly tore the opulent
ostrich feather which I regarded at the time as the glory of my head
gear'.